


Memes and Gay Rights

by Wolfkid9963



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, As in it's 2019 and they never go to the mountain, Cookies, Everyone Is Gay, F/F, GAY RIGHTS!, Gay Josh Washington, Lesbian Beth Washington, Lesbian Hannah Washington, Memes, The worst thing that happens is that Hannah chokes on a cookie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-25 21:43:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19754368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolfkid9963/pseuds/Wolfkid9963
Summary: Hannah accidentally sends a gay meme that was meant for her brother to Jess. Somehow, this wasn't a mistake of the life-ruining kind.





	Memes and Gay Rights

**Author's Note:**

> This is gay, it's got sorta vague descriptions of memes, and it has Hannah and Josh being their usual disastrous selves. What more is there to want?  
> Anyway, Gay Rights baby!!!

_Oh, god._

_This is bad, like, really bad._

In one quick motion, Hannah’s phone was flying across her room, landing with a _thump_ amongst the pillows on her bed. The thing that caused such a reaction from the girl was the realization that she had sent a message to the completely wrong person, and that they had started typing up a reply to what she had sent. It would have been fine if it was literally anything else contained in the message, like “Wanna hang out?” or the very simple “wud” that her dad was so fond of using at odd hours of the day, or even the occasional “if josh and his clown crew don’t quiet down I’m gonna get rid of all the lightbulbs in his room” that she might have sent to Beth, but no. Oh, no, this is so much worse.

The message was simple. A picture, a screenshot from the new (could it still be called that?) animated superhero film, a still that had become A+ meme material. The meme was a proclamation that, while girls existed, there is no hope of ever being straight. It was the kind of meme that the Washington siblings would often exchange, as none of them had even a lick of desire towards the opposite gender (despite what most of their friend group thought).

Beth would respond to such a meme with a proclamation that girls are the only reason for living, a sentiment that Hannah half-way shared, whereas Josh would reply with a statement like: _‘Tis the truth, unfortunately. By that I mean, completely fortunate._

However, the receiver of this meme was not Josh, or Beth, or even Sam (who she somehow hasn’t been able to come out to yet), the receiver was none other than Jessica Riley. Hannah supposes that it was an easily explainable mistake, Jess and Josh do appear right next to each other when her contacts are arranged alphabetically. She mis-tapped, and then didn’t bother to check the barren chat she and the blonde shared. Any other message could have easily been explained away as being for someone else, and this one might have been, too, if not for the content.

If Hannah said that the meme was meant for Josh, then Jess might easily figure out her tendency to seek companionship with the same gender, which is a problem, because of two things. One: while Jess is not homophobic (well… not to Hannah’s knowledge, anyway), Hannah is still not out to her. Two: Jess is definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent without-a-doubt straight. What if she’s like _those_ straight girls, that will choose to avoid her so that Hannah will have no chance of even beginning to harbour an attraction to her? While Hannah and Jess aren’t exactly good friends, Hannah can’t bear to have an awkward atmosphere with a large part of the friendgroup.

Hannah sat on her chair, and she may or may not be shaking. It was awfully quiet in her room, the only noise coming from downstairs as Josh attempted baking whilst blasting David Bowie at full volume. In fact, Hannah could barely hear her own rapid thoughts through the remaster of _Moonage Daydream_ (Josh’s butchering of the lyrics barely heard underneath). She heard no vibration, the telltale sign hat her message had been answered.

When Hannah determined that her phone was not about to spontaneously combust on her bed, she got out of her chair and crept towards it. Slowly, quietly, as if any noise at all would make the phone come to life and devour her for her oops-wrong-person sins. Once she was close enough, she snatched her phone from amongst the brightly-coloured pillows and then glanced nervously to the screen.

Unfortunately, it was back to the home screen, which meant she had to go through the whole process of going into the app itself and Hannah wasn’t sure if she could handle that. She could see the little _1_ notification bubble on the app and somewhere deep inside, she hoped that it was from literally anyone but Jess. Sam, Chris, Josh’s psychologist, even the one barista she said “I’d like to order a Hannah for iced tea, please” would have been better than facing anything that Jessica Riley might have sent.

Steeling herself, holding her phone as far away from her body as possible and scrunching her eyes mostly-shut, she tapped on the app, and it opened onto the chat she had abandoned thirty seconds ago.

Hannah had shut her eyes entirely in the time it took to tap and for the app to fully open once more, so she couldn’t see the reply. After revelling in the bliss of ignorance for a couple moments longer, Hannah decided to just take the leap and finally (very, very, painstakingly slowly) open her eyes.

Hannah gaped at the screen.

_What._

Instead of a proclamation of disgust, a request to stay as far away as possible, or even “Wait, you’re gay?”, it was a picture.

Not just any picture, it was a meme.

A screenshot of a tweet. The tweet stated that only a superhero – the same superhero from the meme Hannah had sent – should defend pride parades, no cops allowed. The tweet had attached photos of the superhero’s accompanying game. The pictures had the superhero taking selfies with various pride flags scattered throughout the game’s city, an inclusion that made many fans of the superhero’s hearts soar.

Hannah almost dropped her phone upon seeing the photo. She wasn’t sure what to process first – the fact that Jessica Riley just responded to her gay meme with a gay meme? The fact that she sent a gay meme of the same hero in the one Hannah sent? Or the fact that Jess even had that photo in the first place?

Hannah licked her lips nervously. She wanted to test something, see if this was just a one-time fluke. She opened her photo gallery, this time carefully considering her wide range of gay memes before settling on a popular subset at the moment: how big companies are using Pride as a way to earn more money. After second guessing herself for a moment, she decides to just do it and presses send. She watches in silent horror slash awe as Jess comes online, opens her message, and then replies.

Once again, it is a gay meme. One of the same subject matter Hannah just sent!

Hannah almost feels like shouting in triumph, but chooses against it, even though nobody would hear it anyway. Josh was still blasting music, however he had switched it to Kesha, and was now butchering every lyric to _Timber_. Oh, the duality of man.

If Beth (or their parents, though they don’t really care what Josh gets up to) were home, Josh would most likely no longer have any lightbulbs in his room anymore. But, they aren’t, so he can do whatever he wants and play whoever he wants (so long as he doesn’t burn down the house in the process).

Hannah looks at the four images from the chat with Jess. She decides, _I’m gonna keep going_. And she does. She continues to send Jess her memes, and Jess continues to reply perfectly, and it fills her heart with glee. Eventually she’s lying among the pillows on her bed, exactly where her phone was before, happily waiting for the next meme Jessica was going to send.

“Hey sis, you want a cookie?” Josh asks with his mouth full of said treat as he opens the door to her room without knocking or announcing himself first. Hannah doesn’t scold him for easily disregarding her own privacy for the sake of whatever he’s made, in fact, she doesn’t even notice him at all at first. She was too focused on her phone, smiling a wide smile and giggling a bit when she receives a meme she’s never seen before.

Then, Hannah notices his presence and sits up. Josh has got a chocolate-chip cookie half-hanging out his mouth from between his teeth, and his eyebrows are raised in the cartoonish way that only Joshua Washington can manage. He holds up a treat identical to the one in his mouth to show Hannah, then presents the tray he’s holding in his other (gloved) hand. Hannah rolls her eyes at him before taking the cookie he’s offering.

Josh then steps into her room fully, and places the tray down at the foot of his sister’s bed, then takes a seat beside it, crossing his legs and putting a pillow in his lap. He takes a moment to grab onto his cookie, bite down on it, take his time to chew then swallow.

“So,” Josh says oh-so-casually after he finishes all that, “what’s got you all smiley?” Hannah blows a raspberry at him, quick to lock her phone so that her brother’s prying eyes don’t catch a peek at the rainbow-filled chat with the blonde that _isn’t_ her childhood best friend.

“Y’know. Gay memes,” Hannah says casually, bringing her cookie up to her mouth to tentatively bite at. Josh nods slowly, smile wide on his face, as if this was a perfectly reasonable reason to be smiley (which it was).

“From Beth?” Josh says, resting his head in the oven mitt clad hand, his eyes sparkling. Hannah takes a moment to pause and think about how to answer. If she tells the truth then, well, who knows how her brother will react! This is Jessica Riley, after all. If she lies, Josh might catch onto it (she had never been good at lying, especially those few times when she had swapped places with Beth for a day) and then he might grill her for the truth, and how can she say no to her brother? The outcome will always end with Josh finding out who she was talking to, the big difference being how Hannah comes out in the end. Embarrassed or with dignity?

“No,” Hannah says after a moment of consideration. She thinks about what she was going to say carefully, then after a moment she adds before her brother could interject, “… from Jess.”

His jaw drops, and Hannah is honestly surprised at how cartoonish Josh can be sometimes. The eyebrows, the jaw, the way he can sometimes do things no humans could ever hope to physically copy. A mischievous glint sparkles in his eyes then, and Hannah narrows her own bespectacled ones at him. When a smile starts to overtake his face, she decides to stop whatever he was thinking.

“ _Please_ don’t tell me you two had a bet,” Hannah pleads quickly, referring to one of the many bets she knows her siblings have with each other, before he could say anything. His mouth shuts immediately, but it’s open again after a second.

“Can I at least say that Beth owes me twenty bucks?” Josh begged, sticking out his bottom lip like a child would. Hannah is taken aback for a moment before she quickly asks back, “Why _twenty_ bucks?”

Josh chuckled, then shaking his head like he was an elder and Hannah was a student that would never understand what he knows.

“Beth was so sure that she was straight that she was willing to give her left hand for it, so we settled on twenty bucks,” Josh explains before barking out a laugh. “The look on her face when I tell her is gonna be priceless!”

Already Josh had that scheming face on, one that looked an awful lot like the Grinch when he had a wonderful awful idea. He most likely wasn’t planning to steal Christmas, as it was the middle of January, and at worst he was most likely trying to figure out the best way to take a picture of Beth’s face when he announced Jessica’s apparent queerness.

Before she could stop him from spouting any of his ideas to her, the phone vibrated. Immediately both sets of Washington eyes were on the device, and Hannah reached out to take a look at the message Jess had sent her, also while taking a bite out of the cookie. Josh watched her attentively as the screen lit up.

Hannah sputtered for a moment then started choking on the baked good, and Josh was quick to jump to her aid. Before he tried to attempt Heimlich, he clapped her hard on the back. That seemed enough to get her to stop choking, and she took in multiple deep breaths, eyes wide and slightly teary.

“What’d she say, sis?” Josh questioned after a moment when he figured that his sister was fine. Hannah takes a moment to look at her phone again, as if to see if the thing she was sent was actually real, before turning back to her brother.

“Jess asked me out on a date.”

**Author's Note:**

> The worst thing that happens is Hannah choking on a cookie, that is SO new.   
> Also, yes, those are Spider-man memes.


End file.
